Donna Trueit, William Doll, Hongyu Wang, & William Pinar (eds.) The Internationalization of Curriculum Studies. NY: Peter Lang, 2003, pp. 15-33.
The elevator in Raubinger Hall is very slow. Everyone is always waiting, waiting. Will it come? Why does it take so long between each floor? More than anything else in my work these days, this elevator dominates most every experience. If it’s not just slow, but out of service, I will have to trudge up and down two flights of stairs lugging a cartload of manipulatives to each class. If it’s merely taking its time again, I’ll spend several minutes complaining with the rest, sharing impatience and anger. I find myself repeating advice that I heard back when I was an undergraduate music major; then, too there was a frustratingly slow elevator. Alvin Lucier, a professor and composer, would wait with us and suggest that we celebrate our technology: accept this treasure that the elevator gives us, of time. Time to relax, to think, to not have to be doing anything else but waiting and then riding the elevator. The elevator experience was a musical composition, a pattern of pauses and movements in time and space. A delicious opportunity to experience. So now I find myself talking to students I have not yet met, other faculty racing late to class on the third floor: take this treasure, I say; enjoy this moment in time. We’re all crazed with speed and things we have to do, but here we have something that we can take as ours, a time away from all else and all the demands of others that encroach on our peace, a time that is only for us. By taking the elevator in this way, it is no longer an eternal wait; it is a moment that we cherish.
Some years after that music phase of my life, as I was a graduate student in mathematics searching for meaning and purpose in my efforts and life’s work, I had possibly my first and only genuinely religious experience. Reading Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The Sabbath, I was not only reading about the Sabbath as a place in time, as a treasure waiting for me to seize and enjoy, but was transported to another space thoroughly removed from my everyday life’s thrills, fears, and obligations. We seem to need these kinds of oases these days. Indeed, many educators have suggested that schools can and should be such oases from the ennui or violence of everyday life (Greene 1982).
Heschel offers us the Sabbath, and many people do find this place in time serves a unique purpose, while others pursue meditation, aerobic exercise, and so on. The interesting thing about these “treasures” is that they are not gifts or possessions: they are unowned objects waiting to be seized. And it is not enough just to take them. It takes a lot of effort to find them, even though they are there always to be seized. And we must put in an enormous amount of effort in order to seize them. It is as if something is holding us back, as if we are always acting not to find them, until we do; and then we know they were always there. Looking back, it was not the Sabbath that I took, but Heschel’s beautiful meditation on the Sabbath. The Sabbath is not something we receive as a gift but something we must pursue as a treasure. Heschel’s book is the treasure I possess, and I “own” the experience of reading this book; the Sabbath itself is something that must be embraced on my own through my own efforts.
This issue of “property,” and of the need for serious labor in order for property to be recognized as owned, is deeply entrenched in Ameroeuro culture. And the idea that it is the basis for education has a long tradition as well. Rousseau (1979) recognized this for his education of Emile. For Emile to be happy, he must learn over time that “the best way to provide oneself with the things one lacks is to give up those that one has” (81). Early in life, writes Rousseau, a child reaches out toward objects. A child is stretching “his” hand well before “he” can say anything, not yet comprehending the distance. At first the lack of comprehension is like an error of judgment.
But when he complains and screams in reaching out his hand, he is no longer deceived as to the distance; he is ordering the object to approach or you to bring it to him. In the first case carry him to the object slowly or with small steps. In the second act as though you do not even hear him. The more he screams, the less you should listen to him (66).
In this parable of the object, Rousseau asks us to recognize the essential link between the labor of seizing objects and the ownership of the object. He believes it is important to accustom a child not to give orders either to people (to establish a taboo against owning people as objects to seize) or to things (for things can not hear, can only be taken by one’s own serious efforts).
Thus, when a child desires something that he sees and one wants to give it to him, it is better to carry the child to the object than to bring the object to the child. He draws from this practice a conclusion appropriate to his age, and there is no other means to suggest it to him (66).
Hence my theoretical leap that a teacher should never give the knowledge and skills to a student as a gift. If school is a place in time, then this place can not be owned in this way unless it is taken as such an object. We can carry children to the space, but they themselves must take it. It turns out in the end that it was always there, and that we just did not see it yet. But it is in another real sense only there when we take it.
In my family these days, the Sabbath occasionally takes on this role. More routinely, however, our “Sabbath” is found in the evening ritual of reading before bedtime. We read every night with both of our children, Noah almost eleven, and Sophia, who is six. We have been reading for as long as I can remember. This is not bedtime reading, although it may have started out that way, and it does continue to be part of a slow winding down toward going to sleep. Rather, it is a time outside of time. All four of us are all together, in one bed, and we take turns reading a book ostensibly for one child and then the other. All four of us read and listen to all of the reading together. As parents, we bring our children and ourselves to the reading. Each of us on our own, however, must “take” the reading for ourselves; it is at this point that the reading is there.
Rousseau does not share our enthusiasm for reading together. He warns that it is the “companion of his games” (159) that the child approaches. It is instead the “severe and angry man” who takes him by the hand, speaks gravely, and takes him away into a room of books.
What sad furnishings for his age! The poor child lets himself be pulled along, turns a regretful eye on all that surrounds him, becomes silent, and leaves, his eyes swollen with tears he does not dare shed, and his heart great with sighs he does not dare to breathe (159).
But perhaps he thinks we parents are trying to teach a love of books, rather than merely allowing the books to be taken together, as Rousseau and Emile are together, “never depend[ing] on one another, but [always agreeing]” (159). He warns us that “Our didactic and pedantic craze is always to teach children what they would learn much better by themselves and to forget what we alone could teach them” (79). In this spirit our reading books is one of our games, our love of books is what we parents alone could teach our children about who we are.
But what can the child learn about herself? What is hers and hers alone? Rousseau notes for us how difficult this is, because so very little of what is around a child genuinely belongs to the child. A child can not understand her clothing, her furniture, her toys, as property in the sense that Rousseau means, because she can not fully comprehend how they came to be clothing, furniture, toys, or how they came to be “hers.” To say that they were given to her, and that is why they are hers, is no better, since in order to give one must already have; besides, a gift is a form of convention, something only learned through years of enculturation. Property thus is something exterior or anterior to a child.
Therefore Emile, and all children by extension, need to learn about property. Emile is encouraged to see himself in the garden he has created. He has taken possession of the earth by planting a bean, by returning every day to care for his garden, by investing his time and labor, his effort, finally his person there. “There is in this earth something of himself that he can claim against anyone whomsoever, just as he could withdraw his arm from the hand of another man who wanted to hold onto it in spite of him” (98).
One fine day he arrives eagerly with the watering can in his hand. O what a sight! O pain! All the beans are rooted out, the plot is torn up, the very spot is not to be recognized. O, what has become of my labor, my product, the sweet fruit of my care and my sweat? Who has stolen my goods? Who took my beans from me? This young heart is aroused. The first sentiment of injustice comes to shed its sad bitterness in it. Tears flow streams. The grieving child fills the air with moans and cries. I partake of his pain, his indignation. We look; we investigate; we make searches (99).
It turns out that the gardener did it! But he, too, is furious. He had planted his melons on this land, had come back after investing labor and time to see his melon patch ripped asunder and some beans there instead. This was his property, and should not have been taken by anyone else. “In this model of the way of inculcating primary notions in children one sees how the idea of property naturally goes back to the right of first occupancy by labor” (99).
I want to tie all of this together. On the one hand, something is ours when we take it through labor and not when it is given to us. This is what constructivists mean when they say that learners need to construct their own knowledge. A child takes objects, both physical and symbolic, and in the process takes ownership of these objects; at the moment of taking, the child owns knowledge that has always been there but was not “real” to her before the taking. On the other hand, the very place in which such labor unfolds is not a place of learning until it is taken as such. This is what Herb Kohl (1991) means when he writes about the role of assent in learning. A student is not in school until the moment in which she takes a place as school. When an adult and a child together take a place as theirs, danger lurks in the adult’s first occupancy by labor. The property belongs to the adult.
Rousseau negotiates a deal for Emile. He can work the land as “his” garden in return for sharing half of the produce with the farmer, but more importantly for making sure that he respects the farmer’s labor and thus ownership of the melon crop. He must set aside his garden in a space not yet worked by the farmer. The labor in the taking of the land is, in the end, more important than the right of first occupancy. And it is upon this principle that modern pedagogy is based. As long as the child labors herself, we trust that she can take possession of knowledge. Still, we come back to the notion that the earth is not a garden until one takes it as a place in which to make a garden. Just as Emile gets the idea for taking a space as a potential garden from noticing farmers already working the soil around him, so do we hope that our students will get the idea of taking a place as school by watching others. Here is the principle that guides all barriers to modern pedagogy: What happens if Emile never thinks it interesting that farmers are doing all this plowing and sowing and watering and harvesting? What happens if a child does not take school as a place for learning?
In our nightly reading at home there is no such issue, I believe. This is because we are in a place where people do not ‘not take’ “sitting around with books and decoding the words and talking about what they mean” as reading. Now this reading is not always the object that I describe above. Sometimes we are merely going through the motions, and this special place in time is lost, we can’t find it anymore. But at other times we know it is there, and it has always been there. There are special books that have been the focus of these times, maybe because of their special-ness or maybe because of what we came to the reading with at that time. It will be hard to know why they are special. However, I can recall two books that seemed to resonate particularly well, and also seem—probably without randomness—to speak to the issue of property and ownership and, in the end, how our relationship with the taking of objects is intimately bound with who we are and how we learn. They speak as well to the issue of losing that place and finding our way back, our way back home.
For Sophia and me, the book is Roald Dahl’s (1982) The BFG, a story about a little girl named, coincidentally, Sophie, who meets a big, friendly giant, and how they together save the world from bigger, evil giants and make it possible for all the boys and girls to have beautiful dreams. For Noah and me, the book is another work by Dahl (1975) that includes a cameo appearance by the BFG, Danny, The Champion of the World. In this one, a boy named Danny finds out that his wonderful father is even sparkier than he thought when he learns about the beauty of poaching that he can share with him. Of course I believe these books are about more than these brief descriptions. They are first of all about my relationship with my children. How Sophia loved to listen to me reading The BFG; how the BFG may or may not caricature a father, every girl’s big, friendly giant who towers over her and frightens her at first, but quickly comes to be known as a protector against scarier, more menacing giants, and then to be the provider of all good dreams. How Noah didn’t want me to stop reading Danny the Champion of the World, and I, in cahoots, stayed up with him past midnight (on a schoolnight!) to finish it; how the father in the story fulfilled his destiny as teacher for his son according to Rousseau’s prescription (this one didn’t hire out a philosophe like Jean-Jacques, relishing his own responsibilities); how my son read the last page, that every boy deserves a father who is sparky, and then declared, “Like my dad’s sparky!” How poaching is not the violation of labor Emile learned from Rousseau, but instead an essential challenge of life requiring careful and skillful planning, analysis, and problem-solving skills; how poaching is in fact the “spark” of life.
We need to unpack a lot of what these books are about, including the problematic gendering of these images, of the role of girls and boys and who does the poaching, who is the listener and who the actor. For now, I want to ask, what is it that enables us to read Dahl as a shift in our taking of poaching? As Alan Block (1999) has written, “The space—seemingly an objective locus—itself has been redefined by the entrance into it by someone whose action changes the potentialities of the space.” (23) Block quotes the Mishnah: “If one sees an ownerless object and falls upon it. and another person comes and seizes it, he who has seized it is entitled to its possession.” The landowner in Danny’s world takes some pheasants as his own; Danny, his father, and it turns out most everybody in town, lay claim to these pheasants because they come along and seize them. Hadn’t Emile’s farmer earned his garden by seizing the land, working it with his labor? Danny, our modern Emile, lives in a place where the landowners no longer work their land but merely fall upon it. Danny’s (and our) classed society understands poaching in a new light. The Mishnah, according to Block, had it right all along: a field may not acquire absolutely for the owner; what is left must be considered unowned and so findable, available for the taking. Gleaning is what Danny does and in gleaning he avoids the plight of the sharecropper Emile, who no longer owns half of what he makes.
Sophie, too, is a new kind of poacher. Her name, synonymous with Emile’s lover, the everywoman for Rousseau, evokes true wisdom—(Just this year, my Sophia noted in her “Proud to Be Me” book that she’s “special” “because my name means wisdom”)—and genders this wisdom in its juxtaposition with Danny, the new Emile. She’s the companion for the BFG, poacher and giver of beautiful dreams.
Ordinary usage of the word “poaching” carries a bad connotation. Crafty thieves who have no respect for wildlife, poachers are typically represented as disregarding licensing fees, ignoring wildlife and its habitat, and thieving for profit or ego (National Anti-Poaching Foundation). Law enforcement agencies go to elaborate lengths to capture poachers (Tisch 1997, Bartz 1999). Yet beneath the rhetoric of sportsmen as the true conservationists and poachers as destructive criminals lurks a romantic intrigue of squirrelly, outrageously clever, artists of camouflage, deception, and ingenuity.
“I’ve seen animals stuffed in hubcaps—turkey breasts, stuff like that,” said Jeff Babauta, a wildlife office with the Florida Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission (GFC). “I’ve found hogs and deer underneath the hoods” (Tisch 1997).
It is this romantic aspect of poaching that Michel de
Certeau (1984) captured in The Practice
of Everyday Life:
Far from being writer-founders of their own place, heirs of the peasants of earlier ages now working on the soil of language, diggers of wells and builders of houses—readers are travellers; they move across lands belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching their way across fields they did not write, despoiling the wealth of Egypt to enjoy it themselves. (174)
When Sophia, Noah, Belinda and I are reading together, suggests de Certeau, we are “not here or there, one or the other, but neither the one nor the other, simultaneously inside and outside, dissolving both by mixing them together, associating texts like funerary statues” that we awaken and host, but never own. Far removed from the bricolage of constructivism, welding conceptual bridges and monuments to our masters, we poachers—crafty as ever—take ownership of things that have been withheld and locked away in others’ fields and forests; we carry these things to new places, to new contexts.
In Danny, Champion of the World, nasty Mr. Hazell stocks his woods with pheasants in preparation for hosting a fancy hunting party for his rich, important friends. As a single parent, Danny’s father hasn’t gone poaching for years, staying home with his son instead. But one day, the yearning is too great and he walks the six and a half miles to Hazell’s wood.
“I have decided something,” he said. “I am going to let you in on the deepest, darkest secret of my whole life.”
“Do you know what is meant by poaching?”
“Poaching? Not really, no.”
“It means going up into the woods in the dead of might and coming back with something for the pot. Poachers in other places poach all sorts of different things, but around here it’s always pheasants.”
“You mean stealing them?” I said, aghast.
“We don’t look at it that way,” may father said. “Poaching is an art. A great poacher is a great artist.”
“Is that actually what you were doing in Hazell’s wood, dad? Poaching pheasants?”
“I was practicing the art,” he said. “The art of poaching” (28-29).
Granddad was a “splendiferous” poacher who “studied poaching the way a scientist studies science” (33). Back in those days, people poached not only because they loved the sport but because they needed food for their families. “There was very little work to be had anywhere, and some families were literally starving. Yet a few miles away in the rich man’s wood, thousands of pheasants were being fed like kings twice a days” (30). But to say that people poach for food is to miss the point. “Poaching is such a fabulous and exciting sport that once you start doing it, it gets into your blood and you can’t give it up.”
A thief would go into the woods with a gun, shoot some pheasants, and drag them home. A poacher practices elaborate schemes, perfecting strategies and techniques for months and years, experimenting on roosters and calculating the interests and fears of the pheasants themselves. Danny’s father inherited a number of these intricately developed secrets from his own dad. The “horsehair stopper” is completely silent.
There’s no squawking or flapping around or anything else with The Horsehair Stopper when the pheasant is caught. And that’s mighty important because don’t forget, Danny, when you’re up in those woods at night and the great trees are spreading their branches high above you like black ghosts, it is so silent you can hear a mouse moving. And somewhere among it all, the keepers are waiting and listening. They’re always there, those keepers, standing strong stony still against a tree or behind a bush with their guns at the ready (35).
We’ll come back to this image of the “keepers,” like the real thieves with their guns, working for Mr. Hazell, and ask who or what the keepers might be for education and reading. For now, though, let’s stick to the elaborate art of poaching:
“What happens with The Horsehair Stopper?” I asked. “How does it work?”
“It’s very simple,” he said. “First, you take a few raisins and you soak them in water overnight to make them plump and soft and juicy. Then you get a bit of good stiff horsehair and you cut it up into half-inch lengths”
“Here’s what my dad discovered,” he said. “First of all, the horsehair makes the raisin stick in the pheasant’s throat. It doesn’t hurt him. It simply stays there and tickles. It’s rather like having a crumb stuck in your own throat. But after that, believe it or not, the pheasant never moves his feet again! He becomes absolutely rooted to the spot, and there he stands pumping his silly neck up and down just like a piston, and all you’ve got to do is nip out quickly from the place where you’ve been hiding and pick him up.”
“Is that true, dad?”
“I swear it,” my father said. “Once a pheasant’s had The Horsehair Stopper, you can turn a hosepipe on him and he won’t move. It’s just one of those unexplainable little things. But it takes a genius to discover it.”
“My father paused, and there was a gleam of pride in his eyes as he dwelt for a moment upon the memory of his dad, the great poaching inventor.” And this wasn’t even the technique Danny’s dad had used that evening, having chosen The Sticky Hat instead. Laying a trail of raisins to a little paper hat in a small depression in the ground, he smeared it with glue and filled the hat with more raisins. The old pheasant was supposed to some along, pop his head inside to gobble up the raisins, and the next thing find a hat over his eyes, so that he can’t see a thing. Here too the pheasant will not move and can be gently collected on the way out of the woods. As with any art, it takes practice, and this night, the first in many years, Danny’s dad was out of practice.
A bricoleur is given a toolbox out of which she fashions new uses for the tools. Schools drill us in skills and intellectual tools, hoping that some day a few of us may use them in new ways. Instead, most of us leave disaffected, yet master our bricolage in the realm of popular and consumer culture (Fiske 1989, Appelbaum 1995); like the affichist artists of the 1920s, we scavenge the worthless trash of popular capital, and re-tool our clothes and images to meet the crises of our culture. We buy things to make a statement, and use these things we buy to make new statements. What would our lives be like if schools were places that foster poaching? There is no buying and selling, no consumer culture. Students would take as theirs the knowledge and skills that adults are immorally safeguarding for their own pleasures. Instead of waiting around for small gestures of generosity, waiting for paralled gifts of knowledge, students would be refining and extending their crafts of poaching, of taking as their own these knowledges and skills.
Indeed, people are poachers. Poaching makes life “sparky.” The keepers of knowledge protect that knowledge from students as Mr. Hazell’s keepers guard his pheasants. And those keepers hide this knowledge so that it’s hard to find; like the pheasants who disappear into the trees after twilight, knowledge in the classroom is made invisible by the rules and regulations of the school, the curriculum standards and school expectations. Students and teachers play elaborate, intricate games in order to poach a place in these classrooms, and the playing out of these games becomes the fun of being there, indeed becomes the “real” curriculum of the school. Resistance theorists have presented a less optimistic view of these games. Here I offer a potentially more positive interpretation of resistance as poaching. The basic idea is that the treasure cannot be given to another person, because it is in the taking of that treasure that the spark is found, in the poaching that the meaning of the encounter is manifested.
A generous teacher tells students what they need to know. Then they know. Is it surprising if the students mock or dismiss what the teacher offers? Is it surprising if the child does not take what the teacher offers? If the child cannot take what the teacher offers? Danny learns that Mr. Hazell’s token generosity is unwanted, because with it comes disrespect and physical threats. There is no need to serve him at the filling station despite the family’s plight of poverty. Rather than take his money, Danny and his dad will take the pheasants he so unjustly keeps in his wood. They will take the pheasants Mr. Hazell is fattening up for entertainment and use them for a good purpose. In the process, however, the purpose is immediately transformed away from stealing or redistribution of resources toward the art of poaching itself, the process and method as opposed to the result. It is like the difference between “fandom” (Jenkins 1988) and “social activism.” Fans buy mass culture products and may even reclaim in a bricolage the shards of popular culture, salvaging pieces of found material in making sense of their own social experience. In fandom, marginalized subgroups of a culture re-read texts and re-write texts in ways that pry open spaces for (women’s, gay, bisexual) voices. Fans often cast themselves as loyalists, rescuing essential elements of the primary texts misused by those “keepers” who police the copyrights. Social Activists, on the other hand, trespass the terrains of consumer culture and its keepers, not to reassert a fundamental truth or preexisting nostalgia, but to glean what can be taken for parallel purposes.
We know that Danny attends school. Indeed, his father walks him all the way to town to get there (2 miles each way). Yet it is Dad who is Danny’s teacher. By the age of eight he was a master mechanic. Now it is the walk to school that is Danny’s real education, a time for looking and talking and learning about nature, and now, planning an extensive new methods of poaching pheasants. Until now, Danny gleaned from the fields along the road things to take and study, he asked questions, and his father answered. Now he asks questions for which nobody knows the answer (“Why does the skylark make its nest on the ground where the cow can trample it?”), and this only peeks his interest even more. His questions have taken on a new role now that he has taken on the aura and excitement of a poacher. Before dad let Danny in on poaching, her merely led his son to places of freedom where unowned objects could be seized. This alone made Danny’s education special in its possibilities. But now there is the pleasure of the game: Danny can’t just seize; he has to come up with a clever way to do it without being caught. It is Danny who comes up with a really big plan for poaching a really big number of Mr. Hazell’s pheasants in a really great way.
In The BFG, it is Sophie that comes up with the big plan, after her surprising initiation into something that might be poaching. But for Sophie, it is a Big, Friendly Giant, not her dad, who carries her off into her new state of awareness. This BFG spends his days catching dreams and bottling them up. At night he blows them into the heads of sleeping boys and girls. We met the BFG before, in a bedtime story Danny’s dad told as they were going to sleep in the old caravan behind the filling station. There was no Sophie in that version, but of course Danny didn’t know her. Here we learn that the BFG enters a silent twilight very much like Hazell’s Wood: swirling mist and ghostly vapors, “It was ashy grey. There was no sign of a living creature and no sound at all except for the soft thud of the BFG’s footsteps as he hurtled on through the fog” (80). The BFG, too, has mastered the art of poaching. He waits, quietly, a long net in his right hand. His colossal ears swivel out from his head and gently wave to and fro.
Suddenly the BFG pounced. He leaped high in the air and swung the net through the mist with a great swishing sweep of his arm. “Got him!” he cried. “A jar! A jar! Quick quick quick!”
He catches both the good dreams, the “winksquifflers,” and the bad ones, “frightsome trogglehumpers,” the former to give someone, the latter to bottle up so that nobody will ever have it. The difference between these dreams and Mr. Hazell’s pheasants, however, is that nobody is keeping these dreams from the BFG; he keeps them for the children. Sophie is not capable of catching dreams, and she never learns how. This really isnít poaching, and Sophie is not an initiated comrade. She’s merely a companion. Unlike Danny, who asks more and more questions, and finds an increasingly Sparkier life with father, Sophie is constantly confronted with her narrow-minded presumptions as a “human bean,” and her need to practice polite acceptance. But her destiny is not a Sparky life. She has the loftier role of helping the BFG save all humanity from other giants, the ones who aren’t friendly. Sophie gets him to mix up a special dream for the Queen of England, a dream designed to help her majesty understand what’s behind the large numbers of missing children. She can talk to scary giants and Queens, and she knows how they think. She is pleasant and inoffensive and can talk about anything; she is an effective go-between for those who act, even as she helps to define their actions. Like Rousseau’s Sophie—and I claim the common name is no accident—this one wields power through her femininity, manipulating the big friendly giants (men) behind the scenes, and accomplishing her work through them, using their brute powers and public images. She is a poacher of male public power in this respect, but not a public male. The BFG is likable while Mr. Hazell is not. The BFG is his own keeper and he is generous with his dreams, unlike mean Mr. Hazell, hoarding pheasants for the big showy shoot. Th irony is that mean Mr. Hazell makes it possible for poaching to exist, whereas the benevolent BFG, doling out the right dreams and locking away the bad ones, winds up being the creepier of the two. Docile folks need to poach, and do not ever learn what they are missing. And who provides the oversight for the BFG? Who decides which dreams are winkspifflers, and which are togglehumpers?
Sophie’s world and Danny’s world are not the same. Yet they share the BFG. In both worlds, dreams are not constructed out of objects related to one’s life. Dreams for these children are not the result of poaching but are breathed in as they sleep; dreams are gifts from a benevolent giant. What a creepy image! And this image is not at all the stuff of good dreams that I bring with me from my reading of Winnicott; dreams should be the creative use of objects to evoke the self (Winnicott 1984, 95). It seems that dreaming as poaching is a critical piece of the life project, and this lovable BFG has taken that project away.
The child who can manage dreams is becoming ready for all kinds of playing, either alone or with other children (60).
“It is in the use of objects”, writes Alan Block (1995), “that playing occurs; it is in playing that creativity is realized.” ( 23) Block, too, quotes Winnicott (1971, 101): “Every object is a ‘found’ object. Given the chance, the [child] begins to live creatively, and to use actual objects to be creative into and with.”
Block (1995, 59) again: “The child must be able to use the dream creatively; it must be available for play.”
Sophie loves the BFG “as she would a father” (207). This “father” is the keeper of dreams, her dreams, and, since she can not poach dreams, she can not evoke a self. In the end she teaches the BFG to write not only stories but the story of her life from the beginning: she herself, in a grand twist of irony, is merely the dream of the BFG, as we see on the very last page:
But where, you might ask, is this book that the BFG wrote?
It’s right here. You’ve just
finished reading it. (Dahl 1982, 208)
But of course! We know from the beginning that the BFG poached Sophie. He plucked her out of bed through the window and used her to dream his own new life.
Danny has a different fate. The specter of the BFG haunts
his dreams too. Luckily, however, he has learned the practical, poaching art of
play. He is therefore able to write his own life. “It is not play to do with
the object what it has been ordered to do; rather playing is to do with the
object what we will because it is available for use” (Block, 1995, 60). This is
poaching. This is Danny’s life experience. “The power to endow our world with
our dreams is creativity. Our action creates the world, and then it is our
world and not that of common sense” (Block 1995, 170). We leave Danny and his
dad, two poachers together, in the middle of their dreams, and we know, with
Danny—the narrator of his own life story—that, after they buy just two knives
and two forks, they will buy two more of each.
“And after that,
We would walk home again and make up some sandwiches for our lunch.
And after that, we would set off with the sandwiches in our packets, striding up over Cobbler’s Hill and down the other side to the small wood of larch trees that had the stream running through it.
And after that?
Perhaps a big rainbow trout.
And after that?
There would be something else after that.
And after that?
Ah, yes, and something else again. (Dahl 1975, 204-205)
Everything is in place: I just know that Danny grows up to marry Sophie, exactly like Emile and Rousseau’s Sophie. The poacher writes his life as a tribute to his Dad. The daughter’s life is written by her big, friendly giant.
Should we try, as others have done using different terms in different contexts, to just say that poaching can and must be practiced as an art, studied as a science, by both boys and girls? This is first-stage feminism: poaching the male public presence. And it is not enough. It is little better for Sophie to live the BFG’s dreams than it was to have him give her her dreams. It is crucial that her life story stopped, was arrested at this young age, before she could learn that what she dreams will change the world. She does not yet learn from her dreams. Only when she poaches to dream—what Danny has been given the opportunity to do all of his life—when she dreams as opposed to breathing in the BFG’s dreams, she will evoke her self.
At its best, our family reading is a place in which we each dream. It is a place in time during which we craftily take what is being kept by the keepers as our own, and in doing so evoke our selves. And when we’re done with this book? We’ll read another book. And after that some other one. And yes, something else again. As I said, this is our Sabbath in our secular life. Why should the keepers of the Sabbath guard it for the traditionally observant Jew? We’ve poached it. And in it we poach our dreams.
But we have a lot of work to do if we are to take this into the schools, if we are to explicate more carefully what it means to poach as a learner. Who, exactly, are the keepers? The adults? Do we paint school as children ingenuously strategizing ways to poach the knowledge that adults guard from them to no purpose? This indeed is the life project of children. We are always keeping things from them: she’s not ready for this; he’s not gong to understand this. And in the end our most cherished treasures—our anxieties, our phobias, our prejudices and hubris— are taken to new places to be used in new ways.
Poaching opportunities have been reduced to resistance in our schools, telescoped into the poaching of space, turning time into an object that can be given or taken. Teachers and students take sick days, leave early, arrive late. Students devise elaborate schemes for seizing school as a place in which they evoke their selves: they pass notes, plan their weekend, disseminate important information (where and when certain drugs are on sale, whether or not a hallway will be safe from violence after school...). Students and teachers perform, take the stage to be seen possessing the space: they become a person when they have taken the space. It is in the playing that the creative use of objects occurs. It is not enough to just release all control, to remove the keepers. In the end, we need to sanction the playing around the rules and regulations.
What all of these have in common is that they move away from people jockeying for space toward the possibility of poaching time. We know from Danny’s book that you cannot just poach at any time of the day: One must wait for twilight, when the keepers will have a hard time seeing you, but the pheasants are still on the ground and poachable. Even trout must be poached at a certain time—in the morning, when they are visible but still asleep, is the carefully developed time for tickling them so that they can be seized. Poaching is not just taking things; it is playing, developing, elaborate games for seizing things that are guarded and protected. But poaching is not just playing to poach what the keepers are guarding; it is doing this at the time that poaching is possible; it is the waiting for this time, and then taking it. I don’t just take the elevator in Raubinger Hall: I anticipate the elevator ride in my car on the way to campus, as I walk from my parking space to Raubinger, as I push the button and still don’t know how long I will wait. I can’t just go to the elevator and ride it for fun: the slowness of the elevator must be important at the time I am racing to class, at the time when I am planning my busy day at the office, at the moment when I want to hold time in my grasp as a thing in space. It is just when I am wanting to take time as my own thing, to spend it as I wish, that this treasure can be embraced. The ride is a treasure at this moment, when I can take it as a thing in time.
To gain control of the world of space is certainly one of our tasks. The danger begins when in gaining power in the realm of space we forfeit all aspirations in the realm of time. There is a realm of time where the goal is not the “have”, but to “be”, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord. Life goes wrong when the control of space, the acquisition of things of space, becomes our sole concern (Heschel 1951, 3).
And this is a lot of what is wrong with many of the schools I work in. “Reality to us is a thinghood, consisting of substances that occupy space” (Heschel 5). Blind to “all reality that fails to identify itself as a thing, as a matter of fact,” we build school as a place in space, and knowledge as things to collect, receive, stick together. We don’t see “time, which being thingless and insubstantial, appears to us as if it had no reality.” Instead we are always grasping at time as a thing to have. We say, if only I had more time. There’s not enough time for that. That kind of education, in which I let kids seize what Block calls “un-owned objects,” and in which they choose these objects in the way that they themselves choose, takes “too much time.” There’s not enough time in the day, in the year, to cover all the things I am supposed to cover: we cover, we keep these things hidden because we can’t grab time.
But we also say that this taking of un-owned objects is the stuff of creativity, the stuff of dreams, the evocation of self. Creativity is playing is a realm of time. We should not go to school but wait for, anticipate, and cherish the time of school, regardless of where it is in space: it is a realm of time. Poaching is about time. It is not about getting the pheasants but about doing it in the “best” way, the cleverest way, and doing it without getting caught. “When looking at space,” writes Heschel, “we see the products of creation” (100). This is why we think school is about the products. This is why we list objectives to catch and collect. Heschel continues: “when intuiting time we hear the process of creation.”
So after four years of classroom research in which I had to continually throw over what I thought I had known about gender, in walks Sophia, who, with the help of her friends, lays down a new layer of complexity to the subject. In effect, Sophia enters and claims territory for herself. She prevents me from making the issue of what it means to be a girl in a primary classroom in any way static. She throws in my face what I thought I had known about girls in public. She reclaims the territory of her social world as unique aboriginal territory, and my place as a tribal member alters once again as I am force to consider how our lives and our awareness of the world do and don’t match (Gallas 1998, 146-7).
Another Sophia? This is no coincidence that Karen Gallas has brought to our attention. This Sophia is a poacher, not a woman educated for a male poacher. Where did she come from, and why is this teacher able to find her? I believe Karen Gallas can write about her because Gallas’ classroom is a place where children can poach. It is a place where the teacher is not so sure that she can give anything to her children; a place where the teacher knows that children need to take things from those who keep the stuff of meaning and learning and use it for themselves.
As the years progressed, my concept of ‘teaching well’ altered and good teaching became more than believing that I was covering important curricula and that children were mastering subject matter. I wondered what was the most important part of my work. Was it to get the content across, or to get out of the way of the very serious work that children do below the surface? (Gallas 1998, 2).
Gallas writes:
The classroom is like perishable art. It has an evanescance that
makes it, for me at least, energizing and joyful, but also bittersweet, because
the events are impossible to hold in time as a complete entity. Being a teacher
researcher, however, has given me some capacity to grab onto fragments of the
life that is streaming by me. (146)
Here she is beginning to articulate the problems that emerge when we think that time is evanescence, temporality. Heschel tells us that the fact of evanescence flashes upon us when we pore over things of space. But it is the world of space, he writes, that communicates to us a sense of temporality. Time is everlasting, as it is beyond and independent of space: it is a space that is perishable. I learn from Heschel that things perish in time, whereas time itself does not change. Instead of coveting cultural capital, things in space that I can collect and hoard to be spent in the market of space, I should covet the things of time (90).
We cannot solve the problem of time through the conquest of space, through either pyramids or fame. We can only solve the problem of time through sanctification of time (101).
So if we could sanction poaching in school, we would sanctify time. We could say: these are the rules. Now, how do you want to get these things of space? You have to do it cleverly, and you may not get caught. The cleverer the better. Watch out! It’s dangerous. You could get shot from behind, peppered in the legs at fifty yards, like Danny’s granddad.
“You could go to prison for poaching,” my father said.
There was a glint and a sparkle in his eyes now that I had not seen before (Dahl 1975, 31).
And be careful: There will be traps set to catch you: if you are out of practice you may wind up like Danny’s dad, with a broken foot at the bottom of a deep, dark hole. But, if poaching is sanctioned, the poacher feels like she is champion of the world, and she will never have to fear giants among the giants coming to eat her up. She will write a different life, of her own, of eagerly hiking to new things in time.
The tricky thing is that evocation of self is not the same thing as self-expression. It is not as simple as making it possible for people in school to “be themselves.” Heschel tells us that “the self gains when it loses itself in the contemplation of the nonself” (228). In terms of sanctifying time by means of poaching, I take this to mean that it is in the art of poaching that the self is in contemplation of the world. It is found in the pleasure of the poaching. And, in order to be ready to guide students into poaching, like Danny’s dad, the teacher must have been there before, by which we mean, he or she must be at heart a poacher.
Thanks to Sophia and Noah Appelbaum; to Leif Gustavson, Mark Rodriguez, Bette Goldstone, and Burt Weltman; and special thanks to Alan Block: the best parts of this essay grew out of our conversations.
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